Eight years ago, the cranberry industry was in crisis. A glut of berries had cut prices to record lows and farmers were going out of business. The industry’s solution was to start selling this uniquely US crop overseas.
“We had to find new markets” to survive, said Jeffrey LaFleur, president of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, which represents cranberry farmers in Massachusetts.
The state ranks second in cranberry production, behind Wisconsin. New Jersey is third.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Last year, about 30 percent of US-grown cranberries were exported, accounting for US$133 million in sales.
“We’ve made a concerted effort to look at international markets, and now it’s our focus,” said Toby Stapleton, a spokesman for the Cranberry Marketing Committee, based in Wareham, Massachusetts.
Moreover, despite a near-record cranberry crop this year, demand is outstripping supply. Growers are looking for more land, and Ocean Spray recently opened a large processing plant in Wisconsin.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
“We’ve seen growers looking for additional acreage to grow our industry, and state and federal regulators are looking at the wetland permitting process so it makes more sense for the growers,” said Tom Lochner, executive director of the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association.
“Cranberries are one of the few bright spots of the economy of central Wisconsin,” Lochner said.
To many foreign palates, the bright, bitter berry was exotic, if not bizarre. So Ocean Spray, which processes about 70 percent of the nation’s cranberry crop, started selling the “cranberry mystique,” which “speaks to the taste, the health and the heritage of cranberries,” company president Stewart Gallagher said.
“Some say it’s a polarizing taste,” Gallagher said. “But sometimes being polarizing is better than being plain vanilla.”
The cranberry was presented as something distinctly American, both delicious to eat and beautiful to behold. Foreign journalists are invited to southeastern Massachusetts or central Wisconsin each fall to watch the harvest, where the cranberry plants rise to the top of a flooded bog, and the berries are raked off.
Cranberries are also promoted as something of a superfruit, with the industry providing medical studies showing that cranberry juice may help prevent urinary tract infections, and playing up its antioxidant properties.
“It’s been a big part of the underpinning of our whole marketing strategy,” Gallagher said, “particularly in the Asian market, where food is looked at as medicine.”
The company created a number of new products for the Japanese market, including a carbonated cranberry drink and cranberry-flavored water. Sales in Japan account for about 5 percent of Ocean Spray’s overseas sales.
“It’s the most different market in which we operate,” Gallagher said.
There were also linguistic hurdles. The word “cranberry” does not exist in Spanish, so marketers started calling the fruit arandano rojo or “red blueberry” in Spain. Australia, Britain, Canada and Germany consume the most cranberries.
At the German premiere of the Sex and the City movie, the Cranberry Marketing Committee handed out gift bags with kits to make cosmopolitan cocktails, because “you can’t make a cosmo without cranberry juice,” Stapleton said.
In France, cranberry juice is blended with mango juice, one of the country’s more popular beverages. In Australia and Britain, cranberry sauce is becoming a popular side dish.
The berry has undergone a bit of a makeover in domestic and foreign markets with the addition of the sweetened dried cranberry, which makes it easier to add the fruit to baked goods and other foods. Ocean Spray calls the sweetened dried cranberries Craisins.
“For the most part, the products that sell here sell somewhere else,” Gallagher said.
MORE VISITORS: The Tourism Administration said that it is seeing positive prospects in its efforts to expand the tourism market in North America and Europe Taiwan has been ranked as the cheapest place in the world to travel to this year, based on a list recommended by NerdWallet. The San Francisco-based personal finance company said that Taiwan topped the list of 16 nations it chose for budget travelers because US tourists do not need visas and travelers can easily have a good meal for less than US$10. A bus ride in Taipei costs just under US$0.50, while subway rides start at US$0.60, the firm said, adding that public transportation in Taiwan is easy to navigate. The firm also called Taiwan a “food lover’s paradise,” citing inexpensive breakfast stalls
TRADE: A mandatory declaration of origin for manufactured goods bound for the US is to take effect on May 7 to block China from exploiting Taiwan’s trade channels All products manufactured in Taiwan and exported to the US must include a signed declaration of origin starting on May 7, the Bureau of Foreign Trade announced yesterday. US President Donald Trump on April 2 imposed a 32 percent tariff on imports from Taiwan, but one week later announced a 90-day pause on its implementation. However, a universal 10 percent tariff was immediately applied to most imports from around the world. On April 12, the Trump administration further exempted computers, smartphones and semiconductors from the new tariffs. In response, President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration has introduced a series of countermeasures to support affected
CROSS-STRAIT: The vast majority of Taiwanese support maintaining the ‘status quo,’ while concern is rising about Beijing’s influence operations More than eight out of 10 Taiwanese reject Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework for cross-strait relations, according to a survey released by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Thursday. The MAC’s latest quarterly survey found that 84.4 percent of respondents opposed Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formula for handling cross-strait relations — a figure consistent with past polling. Over the past three years, opposition to the framework has remained high, ranging from a low of 83.6 percent in April 2023 to a peak of 89.6 percent in April last year. In the most recent poll, 82.5 percent also rejected China’s
PLUGGING HOLES: The amendments would bring the legislation in line with systems found in other countries such as Japan and the US, Legislator Chen Kuan-ting said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) has proposed amending national security legislation amid a spate of espionage cases. Potential gaps in security vetting procedures for personnel with access to sensitive information prompted him to propose the amendments, which would introduce changes to Article 14 of the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法), Chen said yesterday. The proposal, which aims to enhance interagency vetting procedures and reduce the risk of classified information leaks, would establish a comprehensive security clearance system in Taiwan, he said. The amendment would require character and loyalty checks for civil servants and intelligence personnel prior to
RSS